WND EXCLUSIVE

Huckabee to interview 'Without God' author

William Murray on schedule for Fox News show this weekend

Published: 05/02/2012 at 10:10 PM

Text smaller

Text bigger

William Murray, the author of “My Life Without God,” will appear on the Fox News show “Huckabee” this weekend to discuss his book about the forces trying to remove Christianity from public life in America.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s show airs at 8 p.m. Eastern on both Saturday and Sunday.

It was 30 years ago that Murray first released “My Life Without God,” his account of growing up as the son of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder and president of the group American Atheists. His mother used him as a pawn in a lawsuit that ultimately led to the Supreme Court ruling it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct school prayer.

He now serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that works to aid Christians living in Muslim and communist-controlled nations.

The book, which told the true story of the people and movement behind the unholy crusade to remove prayer from public schools, instantly became an international bestseller.

Long out of print, the classic is back to commemorate its 30th anniversary. WND Books is making “My Life Without God” available for a whole new generation of Americans to learn the shocking details of how and why school prayer was eliminated.

WND CEO Joseph Farah considers Murray’s book to be one of the most important conservative books ever published and credits it with being one of the stories that helped shaped his worldview.

“Bill Murray’s “My Life Without God” was a seminally important book for me when I first read it in the early 1980s,” Farah said. “I was a young journalist drifting further and further from my left-wing and secular worldview. I was horrified by Bill’s vivid and no-holds-barred description of his early life in the home of his famous atheist mother. It made me realize the importance of functional families and transcendent values. It’s also such a hopeful book because if Bill Murray could overcome that experience and find salvation, indeed any of us can. I put this book up there on my list of conservative classics right next to Whitaker Chambers’ ‘Witness.’”

Murray was just an innocent child when his mother used him as a plaintiff in the case that ultimately led the Supreme Court to decide that compulsory prayer and reading of the Bible in pubic schools was unconstitutional.

In 1980, he would convert to Christianity and two years later publish the true account of the motivations behind the forces that conspired to have prayer removed from public schools.

“‘My Life Without God’ is a lurid insider’s tale that helped to shape the conservative movement when it first appeared some 30 years ago. It describes the depravity at the heart of the godless, and how close we came to losing our moral compass as a nation. My thanks to WND for making this book available to a new generation of young Americans so they will not repeat the mistakes of the past,” wrote Kenneth R. Timmerman, author and Republican candidate for Congress from Maryland.

After Madalyn Murray O’Hair in 1963 won the lawsuit over prayer, she founded American Atheists and used her notoriety to sue, unsuccessfully, Baltimore to start taxing churches. She also filed lawsuits against Baltimore’s school board to take “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance and against Maryland over the state’s “moment of silence.”